A lots of WhatsApp users in Argentina warn about a form of deception that seeks to hijack accounts making the victims believe that they call in to assign the shift for the second dose of the vaccine.
Once the criminals take control of the account, they steal contact details and contact them to request money using some pretext, such as an economic urgency.
In one of the many cases that have been registered in the country, the scammers posed as the Government of the City of Buenos Aires and communicated with the victim via WhatsApp to inform you about the turn for the second dose of the covid-19 vaccine.
According to the site Welive Security, the thieves in these cases send a link and they ask the unsuspecting victim to send them the code that they will receive below so that they can assign them their turn.
However, what the user actually sends inadvertently is WhatsApp verification code to activate the account on another device.
Once they gain control of the account, They extract the contact list and profile photo, then communicate with their contacts and request money. In the case we mentioned, the scammers requested 50 thousand pesos from family and friends saying that they were going through a difficult economic situation.
According to the victim, the number from which they communicated had the same logo as the WhatsApp account with which they communicated to manage the shift for the first dose.
The main recommendations to avoid falling into this deception is to verify that the communication is legitimate, do not share any code with anyone, and activate two-step authentication. The latter will mean that to access the account the user has to enter, in addition to the code that arrives via SMS, a 6-digit PIN that only the user knows.
It is worth remembering that this form of deception in which they request to resend a code to steal your WhatsApp gutter is not new. At the beginning of 2020 we warned about a similar identity theft campaign.
–
